Re: Please open sysfs symbols to proprietary modules
From: Chris Friesen
Date: Mon Feb 07 2005 - 11:08:56 EST
Lee Revell wrote:
On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 21:50 -0500, Kyle Moffett wrote:
It's not like somebody will have
some innate commercial advantage over you because they have your
driver source code.
For a hardware vendor that's not a very compelling argument. Especially
compared to what their IP lawyers are telling them.
Got anything to back it up?
I have a friend who works for a company that does reverse-engineering of
ICs. Companies hire them to figure out how their competitor's chips
work. This is the real threat to hardware manufacturers, not publishing
the chip specs.
Having driver code gives you the interface to the device. That can be
reverse-engineered from watching bus traces or disassembling binary
drivers (which is how many linux drivers were originally written).
Companies have these kinds of resources.
If you look at the big chip manufacturers (TI, Maxim, Analog Devices,
etc.) they publish specs on everything. It would be nice if others did
the same.
Chris
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